Workflow Automation Software

Millennia Group Blog

Mission Not Impossible

Via Flickr, Tony Werman and Funtoosh

It’s difficult to claim that you are compliant with internal or external rules and regulations if you don’t have a good base to start with.  Take the concept of the accurate value of your customer contracts for instance or exposure due to vendor contracts, both part of any Sarbanes Oxley regulations (SOX).  It’s hard to imagine having complete confidence in those values or exposures, defined as no more than 5% deviation by SOX, if you don’t have confidence in the collection of supporting documentation.

The focus on customer contracts should take precedence and probably does already in terms of recording the contract terms in your billing system.  But the effort for the most part is still a manual…

Bring on the auditors!

Regulatory and other entities that audit

Does the thought of going through an audit scare you?  What is an audit?  According to The American Heritage Dictionary, an audit is – An examination of records or financial accounts to check their accuracy or confirm adherence to policy or regulation.  And what does an auditor do? Performs verification and substantiation procedures.  And what types of audits are there? Financial, compliance, internal, security and many more.   

Audits are not something that most of us enjoy going through.  Not for nefarious reasons, but mostly because of the extra time demands and that feeling of uncertainty about providing the required information.  Your accounting system or ERP has been designed to collect and keep your transaction information.  However, can your auditor verify and substantiate the transactions or adherence to…

How old are you?

Explore

Try to remember the days of all files being on a shared network drive or all data in spreadsheets.  Try to remember creating and sharing the responsibility of managing a spreadsheet.  What was the largest group of cohorts that you worked with to create a spreadsheet?  Is that easier now than before?  If you need to go back and find the final version of that file, is it easy to do?  Is it easy to share internally and externally?  Do you even need to create spreadsheets anymore?

Is your world any better now that you have implemented that all-encompassing, do all solution be it ERP, contract management, collaboration, or document management solution?  Is it easier to create, collaborate on, find and share information?  Is there better…

Are file rooms making a comeback?

Via Flickr - Mohamed Baseeth

There was a time when all important company information was on a shelf or in a file cabinet.  Well organized companies could be fairly satisfied that people could find legal documents in the legal department and accounting files in the accounting department.  And with photocopiers and overnight delivery services, documents could even be shared.  When the department appointed a czar to manage their stash of documents, it all seemed to work even better.

But we all know how the story ends.  The czar retired, the company bought four other companies, people forgot the alphabet and this new-fangled computer thing arrived.  Then people weren’t so happy.  Documents weren’t easy to find.  However, with email and the internet, documents did become easier to create and…

Don’t Let Complexity make you Complacent

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With all the complexities in the world, how do you determine what to focus on in 2022?  HR and employee issues concerning remote work and wellness?  Office or retail space utilization?  Supply chain issues?  Inflation and pandemics?  World events that could cause disruption?  Blockchain, artificial intelligence, green energy and on and on?  And don’t forget the needs of your customers.

What’s needed is a simple How To Guide to manage this overwhelming challenge to your resources.  There is an old saying paraphrased as “don’t build a house on sand”.  In other words, use your resources to build a solid foundation.  Then you will have the ability to manage a myriad of risks and harness amazing opportunities when they come.  Here are four tasks…

Magic and madness

How can it be that there is both magic and madness when it comes to implementing workflow?  The magic is when you experience the efficiency of a successfully completed process – the approved budget, the signed contract, the approved scholarship.  The madness is getting to that point.

Getting a digital workflow process designed and implemented is fun for people like me who love the challenge of figuring it all out.  But it can be complete madness for others as they work to define the real process and consider options made available by the technology.  If you want the magic and to avoid the madness as much as possible, follow these steps.

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Is this the real end of paper?

The paperless office concept has been talked about for years.  In fact, at least for all of the 25 years that Millennia Group has been in business with that as our focus.  But, here we are and our facility is full of boxes of paper documents that our clients want scanned.  And more boxes arrived today.

But now the concept is no office, not just no paper.  So if there isn’t an office, that pretty much means no paper, right?  What else does it mean?

There is scanning work to be done.  If there was an office and now there will be no office, then any legacy paper files will need to be scanned.  This is achievable with either internal or external…

Human Process Augmentation – I’m not scared

With or without a mechanical or physical component, it seems that a better description might be Human Process Augmentation (“HPA”).  Or at least it seems that if software is the apparatus, it is just augmenting the human process.  You could say that using digital signatures is HPA.  You no longer need to pick up a pen and send out an overnight…

Robotic Process Automation.  The description is a little deceiving based on how it is used.  Generally, people think Robot and they think mechanical apparatus, computer brain, a bit scary.  However, the current use of that description is more broad and is also used to describe software based workflow solutions.

With or without a mechanical or physical component, it seems that a better description might be Human Process Augmentation (“HPA”).  Or at least it seems that if software is the apparatus, it is just augmenting the human process.  You could say that using digital signatures is HPA.  You no longer need to pick up a pen and send out an overnight…

Robotic Process Automation.  The description is a little deceiving based on how it is used.  Generally, people think Robot and they think mechanical apparatus, computer brain, a bit scary.  However, the current use of that description is more broad and is also used to describe software based workflow solutions.

With or without a mechanical or physical component, it seems that a better description might be Human Process Augmentation (“HPA”).  Or at least it seems that if software is the apparatus, it is just augmenting the human process.  You could say that using digital signatures is HPA.  You no longer need to pick up a pen and send out an overnight…

Robotic Process Automation.  The description is a little deceiving based on how it is used.  Generally, people think Robot and they think mechanical apparatus, computer brain, a bit scary.  However, the current use of that description is more broad and is also used to describe software based workflow solutions.

With or without a mechanical or physical component, it seems that a better description might be Human Process Augmentation (“HPA”).  Or at least it seems that if software is the apparatus, it is just augmenting the human process.  You could say that using digital signatures is HPA.  You no longer need to pick up a pen and send out an overnight…

Going to the grocery store is a teaching moment

We have all encountered the situation on our way into the grocery store where a young girl in uniform is selling cookies.  Or maybe it’s someone dressed as Santa ringing a bell.  In both cases, the story doesn’t end there because you have a second encounter when you exit the store.  So the issue is, which do you prefer, addressing the situation on the way in or dealing with it on the way out? This post is not really about the Girl Scouts or the Salvation Army of course.  This is an analogy for how your company deals with its critical business information.  Either your company has a well-defined process and structure to identify information as it enters or it relies on advanced search capabilities to find information where-ever it may hide.  Or,…

On the surface it may look simple

Autonomous vehicles will make driving simple.  Get in, tell the car where to go, sit back and relax.  Artificial intelligence is going to read our minds and do our work for us.  The same goes for robots.  High speed data via 5G wireless will transform our lives by making these and other advancements possible. There are hundreds of steps and parts just to make a simple pencil. The fact of the matter is that behind the scenes lots of hard work is happening to make something seem simple for the end users.  For example, what if artificial intelligence changes its mind or futuristic fabrics confuse the autonomous vehicle system so it doesn’t recognize a person in the street?  To keep it simple requires ongoing work by the engineers and tech teams.

It isn’t…

Blockchain vs AI vs Bob

Regardless of the industry, at every trade show, in every webinar and at every lunch and learn the use of artificial intelligence or blockchain has been a topic.  It’s been stated and debated about how these technologies are going to revolutionize industries and change our lives.  That can be a bit unnerving. However, there is hope for us, AKA Bob.  Blockchain might give us smart contracts built from nothing but data points.  No need to also enter the data into another system, the contract is the system.  AI will take the document (Word, PDF, etc) and it will interpret the information and populate the system automatically.  Poor Bob, who previously found, interpreted and entered the data, gets left out of the process.  But wait….
Blockchain will have some utility in some specific industries or…

Optimism sends a good message

We recently sponsored and exhibited at two technology focused trade shows.  As most companies participating in these shows know, it’s a good way to see existing clients and to meet new prospects.  But its also a good way to stay informed about industry advancements and news, however optimistic.  There can be lots of very optimistic talk and presentations in the tech community. Here’s the thing, however optimistic some people or companies might be, some of those plans and ideas probably make good sense and will someday become the standard.  Of the current crop of hot technology topics, such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, bots and robots, we are optimistic about…
Yes, we are optimistic about some of these technologies, namely AI and bots.  A bot is essentially a digital assistant.  You’ve probably come across…

Tag and push is not a playground game

Companies, large and small, have procedures or rules that employees are supposed to follow to complete certain tasks.  Each company determines the most efficient methods or methods that meet regulatory or compliance requirements.  These rules can be written in a manual, part of a checklist or built into software applications. Rules incorporated into the code of software applications are relatively easy to build and highly effective.  One of the most difficult procedures to successfully implement, however, is document archiving.  When is a document the final final version and where should it be archived?  Making this decision and process easy should be every companies goal, but where to begin?
The first step is to make sure you simplify and standardize the archive hierarchy.  Consolidate the silos of documents into one, organized repository.  This should be…

Should power users drive the bus?

Without a doubt you have come across business or personal applications that are not easy to use.  Business applications in particular can be less intuitive because of the complexity of the tasks required.  But that complexity may be due to over-engineering.  We have all heard of the less is more concept.  But in software, less isn’t really less, its just essential. There are always situations where one user wants another function or feature.  The trick is to identify the essential functions and help power users understand approaches to solving unique tasks.  When the tasks are performed frequently but by a few users or less frequently but by many users, the solution should support those tasks very well.  Here are some things to think about to select a solution that nails the essential functions…

I admit, machines are smarter than me

Machines are smarter than me, at least after some smart people have told it what to think and since it is continually trained to get smarter.  Maybe that computer really isn’t smarter than me, but it certainly has a better memory.  In the context of our current lives, that translates into not forgetting passwords and never forgetting where I saved that file on the network. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are all the rage in most industries, including the document management industry.  There is a convergence of systems offering auto-classification and indexing of your files.  Tagging the file with information that someone can use to find it later and dropping the file in some deep folder structure and forgetting where that was might go away.  That seems like a smart approach and…